Simulation of moon-based observation for large-scale Earth science phenomena

Abstract

It's a new concept to set up sensors on the Moon to observe the large-scale Earth science phenomena. In order to reveal its potentials and characteristics, this paper focuses on the simulative moon-based Earth observation which makes use of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) ephemeris and transformations of relative reference frames. By simulating the observation scenes at different time, we analyze the observation conditions, including observation time series, geometry and effective coverage. The result shows that the moon-based Earth observation has advantages in wide swath, continuous observation and large effective coverage which contributes to the monitoring and understanding of large-scale Earth science phenomena.